The late Dr Eric Lang built a Frankenstein’s monster with the intention of draining the “life force” from recovering vampire Barnabas Collins into it. Wicked witch Angelique turned Barnabas into a vampire in the first place, and has returned to the scene to thwart this experiment and make Barnabas once more an undead abomination preying upon the living. Angelique struck Lang dead with one spell, and with another has started a “Dream Curse” that has for the moment compromised the ability of the senior mad scientist in town, Barnabas’ best friend Julia Hoffman, to pick up where Lang left off.
In Lang’s laboratory, Julia and Barnabas recap the plot. Under the stress of the Dream Curse, Julia is having trouble controlling her emotions. At one point she refers to her crush on Barnabas. Every time she has mentioned this before, Barnabas has been a huge jerk about it, ridiculing her and reminding him of the crimes they have committed together, including murder. This time, he is warm and kindly. His non-obnoxious response marks a significant change in their relationship.
Lang left an audio message for Julia on his tape recorder. He said that if she does the experiment and Barnabas and the Frankenstein’s monster, whose name is Adam, both live, neither Barnabas nor Adam will be a vampire. But if Adam dies, Barnabas will revert. His recovery is already hanging by a thread, as he feels ever stronger cravings for blood.
Julia and Barnabas play the tape today, but leave the room before it gets to the part with the message. Lang’s voice plays to an empty set. Addison Powell didn’t do a very good job playing Lang on screen, and he’s no better as a voice actor. Powell appeared in a number of feature films, including hits like The Thomas Crown Affair and Three Days of the Condor, but is best remembered for a series of commercials he did in the 1980s as “The Gorton’s Fisherman.” I remember those spots- I thought he was an actual fisherman they’d hired to read copy. Usually I’m uneasy with the idea of taking a job away from an actor, since I know lots of very talented people who have spent years training in that craft, never to make a living at it. But Powell was so bad I wish my original impression had been correct.
Julia has reached out to Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, a scholar of the occult, for help with the Dream Curse. When she met with him yesterday, she did not identify Angelique as the witch. She couldn’t tell him anything about the experiment or about Barnabas’ vampirism without confessing to her many crimes. Today, Stokes is trying to fill in the blanks Julia left so that he can help to oppose the Dream Curse. He calls on Barnabas at Lang’s house. He breaks down Barnabas’ resistance and learns that the witch is Angelique, whom he knows under her alias of Cassandra Blair Collins.
Stokes next calls on Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, at her house. Maggie was the first person to have the dream, and she gives Stokes a detailed description of it. This gives Kathryn Leigh Scott an opportunity to look into the camera and emote, which is always worth seeing.
There are a lot of shots today using mirrors. In their post on Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri include several screenshots of these and of ambitious camera angles from other episodes.
Mad scientists Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall) and Eric Lang (Addison Powell) are conferring in Lang’s lab. Lang is putting the finishing touches on a Frankenstein’s monster into which he plans to transfer the “life force” of recovering vampire Barnabas Collins. Julia, Barnabas’ best friend, has been opposed to this experiment, but now has accepted that she can’t stop Barnabas and Lang from going through with it. She volunteers to assist.
Lang is having trouble concentrating because of a nightmare he had last night. Unknown to him, the nightmare was part of the Dream Curse, a dead end storyline about wicked witch Angelique sending a dream that each of a series of people will have. When the last person has the dream, Barnabas is supposed to revert to full-on vampirism.
Lang tells Julia about his nightmare. He says that she was in it. When he tells her that she did not speak, she smiles comfortably and says that that was proof that it was a dream. This is not only a genuinely funny line as Grayson Hall delivers it, but it is an extraordinary moment of self-awareness from Julia, a character who usually exists at the outer edge of heightened melodrama. It’s a shame that Addison Powell doesn’t know how to get out of Hall’s way for the half second it would take for it really to land with the audience.
Barnabas and his ex-blood thrall Willie are at home in the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood. Willie is smirking and Barnabas is rigid with embarrassment while the dogs howl outdoors. Willie laughs a little as he makes a remark about how Barnabas hasn’t changed as much as he thought he had. This exchange reminds us of the moment in #346 when Julia and well-meaning governess Vicki noticed that some fresh flowers Barnabas touched had died and shriveled up. Like the howling of the dogs when Barnabas feels bloodlust, the shriveling of the flowers was a consequence of his vampirism, effectively a bodily function that he cannot control. He squirmed when Julia and Vicki looked at him then, and he is stiff and flustered when Willie laughs at him now.
Barnabas orders Willie to take a letter to matriarch Liz at the great house on the estate. It will explain that he is going away on a long trip, and that Adam Collins, a young cousin from England, will be coming to stay in the Old House. Willie is alarmed by this.
Willie asks what Barnabas will do if Liz won’t let him stay in the Old House when he is in the form of Adam. Barnabas is sure she will, and dismisses Willie’s doubts. This is an interesting sequence to regular viewers. The show has never made it clear whether Liz still owns the house or has signed it over to Barnabas. A whole year ago, in #223, Liz was talking to strange and troubled boy David as if the Old House and its contents were Barnabas’ legal property. Since then, there have been moments that tend to confirm that impression, as when Barnabas takes Liz’ keys to the house away from David and does not give them back to her, and other moments that conflict with it. Willie’s question and Barnabas’ response would seem to prove that the house still belongs to Liz.
Another question we might ask is why Barnabas doesn’t go to Liz himself. Certainly she will be unhappy that he went away without saying goodbye to her. Moreover, when he showed up at the great house in April 1967, Barnabas told Liz that he was the only survivor of the English branch of the family. Liz will be skeptical if another member of this imaginary branch presents himself and expects to take possession of a big mansion on her property. She has had unpleasant experiences with Willie, so much so that a letter he delivers seems unlikely to allay that skepticism.
When Willie gets to the great house, Angelique herself opens the door. She is living there under the name Cassandra. She has cast a spell on Liz’ brother, sarcastic dandy Roger, and married him so that she will have a residence at Collinwood while she works to restore Barnabas’ curse to its full potency. Showing his typical degree of strategic ability, Barnabas has not bothered to tell Willie about any of this.
Angelique/ Cassandra ushers Willie into the drawing room, sits him down, and chats with him. Willie answers her questions about Barnabas, not realizing that he has any more reason to be discreet with her than with anyone else. He tells her that Barnabas has been spending his days with Lang. Angelique/ Cassandra already knows that it was Lang who gave Barnabas the treatments that put his vampirism into remission and that Lang is preparing further treatments for him. Barnabas should know that she knows this, since she went to Lang’s house and tried to kill him. Willie also tells her that sometimes Barnabas doesn’t seem to have changed as much as you might expect. Angelique/ Cassandra’s reaction makes it clear this is new information to her, and that it might help her in her efforts.
The scene raises yet another question. Barnabas had expressed the hope that once the experiment was complete, Angelique would see that his old body was dead, would assume that meant that he no longer existed in any form, and that she would then go away and leave him alone. But he knows that she knows about Lang, and now he is planning to come back to Collinwood, where she lives, as another “cousin from England.” The question is this- how dumb does Barnabas think Angelique is?
Back in the lab, Lang and Julia are preparing for the experiment. Barnabas shows up. When he talks with the doctors, his face is reflected in the mirror above Lang’s creature. Not only does this suggest the idea of his personality moving into the creature’s body, it also reminds us that until Lang gave him his first course of treatment, Barnabas did not cast a reflection. The whole idea of Barnabas’ reflection will remind longtime viewers of #288, when Julia first confirmed her suspicion that Barnabas was a vampire by peeking at the mirror in her compact and not seeing him. That draws a contrast between Lang, whose initial success with Barnabas appears to be leading to disaster because his impersonal, hyper-masculine approach leaves him unable to recognize the threat Angelique poses, and Julia, whose own attempts to cure Barnabas of vampirism did not match Lang’s spectacular results, but whose femininity, as symbolized by the compact, represents a fighting chance against the forces that really govern this universe.
Barnabas takes his place on a bed. He tells Julia he is glad she is with him, and she smiles at him with the sad tenderness of someone saying a final farewell to a loved one. As with her self-deprecating joke in the opening part of the episode, this smile shows a new side of Julia. For a time in October 1967 she tried to launch a romance with Barnabas, and he rejected her. Hall played Julia’s unrequited love in the same larger-than-life style that the rest of her action called for. Her feelings seemed to be an outgrowth of despair- she was by that point so deeply entangled with Barnabas that there was little hope she could ever make a life with anyone else, so even though he was an active vampire, she had little to lose by committing herself to him. But this sweet little exchange is played so gently that it opens a window on a more complex inner life for Julia.
As Lang starts the experiment, we cut to Angelique in the drawing room at Collinwood. She is talking to a clay figure, calling it “Dr Lang,” and saying that it cannot overcome her powers, for they were a gift to her from the Devil himself. She jabs at the clay figure. In the lab, Lang writhes in pain, interrupting the experiment.
It was not until #450 that Dark Shadows let on that there might be anything to Christianity. In that episode, good witch Bathia Mapes held Barnabas at bay by showing him a cross. Up to that point, Barnabas had many times strolled comfortably through the old cemetery north of town, where half the grave markers are in the shape of the cross, and they hadn’t bothered him a bit. The only representatives of the faith who figured in the story were repressed spinster Abigail Collins and fanatical witchfinder the Rev’d Mr Trask, both of whom were fools whom Angelique easily twisted to her own purposes. Now we have a character named Adam, a New Adam through whom a resurrection is supposed to take place, and he is wearing a headpiece that is photographed to look like a crown of thorns. Angelique’s reference to the Devil suggests that she can be defeated only through the aid of a being more powerful than the Devil, and since we haven’t heard about Ahura-Mazda or any other non-Christian deities who represented a supreme principle of good pitted against an otherwise irresistible evil, it looks like we’re drifting Jesus-ward.
It is daring to take that direction, even if it is only for a little bit. Vampire legends are pretty obviously an inversion of the Christian story, in which a man comes back from the dead, not having destroyed the power of death once and for all, but only to die again every time the sun rises. While Jesus feeds us with his body and blood in the Eucharist and thereby invites us to share in his eternal life, the vampire feeds himself on our blood and thereby subjects us to his endlessly repeated death. That’s why Bram Stoker’s Dracula has all those crosses and communion wafers, because it is a religious story of the triumph of the promise of resurrection in Christ over the parody of that resurrection that the vampire has settled for. It also explains why Dark Shadows so studiously avoided Christian imagery for so long. Christianity is such a powerful part of the culture that once you let any of it in, it tends to take over the whole story.
There are many reasons the makers of the show would want to avoid that fate. Not least is the tendency of religions to fracture and stories based on their teachings to become sectarian. Dracula itself is an example of that; the vampire is a Hungarian nobleman from Transylvania, connected with the Szekely clan. There really was such a clan, and like other Hungarian nobles in Transylvania its members were Calvinists, supporters of the same version of Christianity that Abigail and Trask represented. Stoker was a Roman Catholic from Ireland, a country where most Protestants are Presbyterians, a tradition that grew out of Calvinism, and so his depiction of the vampire is clearly driven by sectarian animus. The Collinses have an Irish surname, settled in New England when that region was officially Calvinist, and did very well there. So it would be easy to present their troubles as a cautionary tale about Calvinism. That would seem to be a surefire way to shrink the audience drastically. Not only are there millions of Calvinists whom it would offend, there are billions of people to whom Calvinism means nothing at all, and they would be utterly bored by a denunciation of it.
The episode is daring in several other ways as well. When Barnabas and Willie were first on the show, ABC-TV’s office of Standards and Practices kept worrying that viewers might interpret their relationship, which was founded on Barnabas’ habit of sucking on Willie and swallowing his bodily fluids, as somehow homosexual. Not only is the scene between them at the Old House reminiscent of the scenes that attracted memos from that office in the spring and summer of 1967, but the whole idea of Barnabas draining his “life force” into the body of Adam would seem to invite the same concerns.
The experiment scene would only intensify such concerns. The experiment is a medical procedure that is supposed to bring a new life into the world, which by 1968 was how Americans usually thought of the process of birth. Barnabas is the patient, he is lying down, and the doctors sedate him. Thus he takes on all the medicalized marks of a mother-to-be. Julia asked Lang if the process would be painful for Barnabas; he does not disappoint, but ends the episode screaming in response to labor pains. Not only does turning Barnabas into Adam’s mother invert the expected gender performance, but it also introduces a homosexual side to Barnabas’ relationship with Lang, who is Adam’s other parent.
Somebody ought to be there telling Barnabas he’s doing great and urging him to push. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Christian imagery and gender-nonconformity would have been rather a queasy combination for most Americans in 1968. That’s unusual, in historical terms. Before modern times, Christians didn’t hesitate to discuss ways that familiar gender roles break down in the relationship of humans to Christ. The “Fathers of the Church,” the prominent Christian intellectuals of the fourth and fifth centuries, talked about that all the time, going into depth not just with the image of the Church as the Bride of Christ but of each human soul, whether male or female, as one of Jesus’ wives, and of the physical contact between humans and Jesus in the Eucharist as a consummation of their marriage.
For their part, Calvinists tended to be skeptical of the physical aspect of the sacraments, but that didn’t mean that they shied away from conjugal metaphors to describe the relationship between the soul and Jesus. John Donne, like most priests in the Church of England in the 16th and early 17th centuries, was basically a Calvinist, yet his sonnet “Batter my heart, three-person’d God” is one of the most vivid and uncompromising statements of the ancient idea of an erotic dimension to Christian life that transcends the binaries between masculine and feminine, male and female. That tradition makes today’s conjunction of Christian and homoerotic themes all the bolder- imagine if Dark Shadows wrote itself into a corner where they had no choice but to explain nuptial imagery and mystical eroticism in the writings of Saint Ambrose. The whole audience could fit into a seminar room.
Closing Miscellany
Lang and Julia wear white lab coats. This is the first time Julia has worn a white coat. Her previous lab coat was light blue, which looks white on the black and white TV sets most households had in 1968, but now that the show is being produced in color they are buying costumes and props for color televisions.
The idea of a machine that would cause a person to go to sleep in one body and wake up in another was a big deal on TV in the 1960s. Just today I saw this screenshot from The Avengers on Tumblr:
This episode marks the first appearance of Robert Rodan. When Adam was a nameless heap of flesh under a blanket, he was played by a stand-in named Duane Morris. Rodan had a few small parts on TV shows in 1963 and 1964 and was in a couple of commercials between 1964 and 1968. Adam was his first, and last, recurring role on a series. In 1969, he appeared in a little-seen feature film called The Minx, then spent the rest of his life selling real estate in Southern California.
Dr Julia Hoffman is in the front parlor of the house of her fellow mad scientist, Eric Lang. She is on the telephone, asking the operator to connect her with the police. Even though she has lived in the Collinsport area for months now, she is still surprised that the sheriff’s office doesn’t have an emergency number.
Julia locked the door to the parlor; Lang is outside it with a gun, and recovering vampire Barnabas Collins is knocking and calling her name. They want to stop her reporting to the police that Lang is building a Frankenstein’s monster with body parts retrieved from the cemetery, and that he was planning to cut a living man’s head off to use as the last piece of the creature. Lang plans to bring the body to life by draining Barnabas’ “life-force” into it. Barnabas hopes this will free him of the vampire curse once and for all, and is desperate to complete the experiment.
Barnabas shouts that Julia should remember “someone.” When he can’t come up with the name, Lang prompts him with a yell of “Dave Woodard!” Barnabas and Julia killed local physician Dave Woodard in #341; Julia hangs up the phone, realizing that if the operator ever does manage to find a police officer any investigation of Lang would likely expose her as a murderer.
Barnabas has told Lang a great deal about himself. For example, in #467, Lang was the first person Barnabas told that his vampirism was the result of a curse placed on him by wicked witch Angelique. So returning viewers can believe that Barnabas might have confided in Lang about the murder of Dr Woodard. But it would be strange for him to have done so off-screen. And just Friday, Barnabas explained to Lang that the reason he thinks Julia can be trusted with the secret of the experiment is that she has a crush on him.* He hasn’t had much time to share more information with Lang since then, and if Lang had already known that Julia couldn’t call the cops without exposing herself to a murder charge Barnabas wouldn’t have needed to mention her crush on him. The likeliest explanation is that the loud and clear exclamation of “Dave Woodard!” is not Lang prompting Barnabas at all; rather, it was Addison Powell prompting Jonathan Frid. The result is a blooper that seriously confuses the relationships among Lang, Barnabas, and Julia. It’s early enough in the episode that it really is odd they didn’t stop tape and start over.
At any rate, they never mention Woodard again. He was introduced early in the vampire storyline. He was the counterpart to Dr John Seward, the physician in Dracula who realizes that all the patients who are suddenly showing up with puncture wounds on their necks and massive blood loss need care he is not trained to provide, and calls in his old med professor, Dr Van Helsing. Julia was the Van Helsing analogue, but she wound up siding with the vampire and killing her onetime friend. It is appropriate that the last reference to Woodard comes in this, the second episode of Dark Shadows with no cast members introduced before Barnabas. From now on, the daylight world Woodard represented and tried to restore is no longer present even as a memory.
Julia lets Barnabas and Lang into the parlor, and asks Lang to promise that he won’t kill anyone. He gives such a promise. She is unconvinced, but agrees not to call the police. She also tells Lang she will continue to oppose the experiment.
On the terrace of the great house of Collinwood, Barnabas and Julia talk about Lang’s experiment. Angelique, wearing a black wig and calling herself Cassandra, lives in the house as the wife of sarcastic dandy Roger, and the terrace is surrounded by trees, fences, and other prime screens for eavesdroppers. Barnabas and Julia know this well, as each of them has eavesdropped on important conversations here themselves.
Of course Angelique/ Cassandra comes by and hears everything. Barnabas does catch her, grab her, call her by her right name, and vow that she won’t stop him. After he lets her go, he moans to Julia that it was foolish of them to discuss their plans there. That underlines the foolishness of an idea key to the plan, that after Lang’s creature has been animated Angelique will never realize that Barnabas is dwelling within it and place a fresh curse on it. Barnabas assumes that Angelique, who has transcended time itself to pursue him, will just give up and go away once she sees that his original body is dead, and won’t have any questions about the new guy living at his doctor’s house.
Angelique summons her new cat’s paw, lawyer Tony Peterson. Jerry Lacy plays Tony. From #365 to #461, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s. In that phase of the show, Mr Lacy played the Rev’d Mr Trask, a fanatical witchfinder who inadvertently gave Angelique a great deal of assistance in her campaign to destroy the Collins family and those close to them. Most of the characters in the 1790s segment represent a commentary of some kind on the characters the same actors play in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s. Tony and Trask have seemed to be an exception. In 1967, Tony was introduced through his profession and served mainly as an instance of Mr Lacy’s famous Humphrey Bogart imitation. Trask did end up functioning as a lawyer in a witchcraft trial, and his lunatic shouting about “THE ALMIGHTY!!” and “THE DE-VILLLL!!!!” were occasionally suggestive of what Bogart might have ended up doing if Captain Queeg’s testimony before the court-martial in The Caine Mutiny had gone on for nineteen weeks. Otherwise, there didn’t seem to be any fruitful points of comparison between the two.
Angelique tells Tony that the reason she chose him as her servant was that he reminded her of Trask. She orders him to go to Lang’s and steal a talisman that can guard against witches. At that, Tony shouts “Against you!,” and he sounds very much like Trask. Perhaps we are to think that a secular education and a steady diet of Hollywood movies could have turned the farcically warped Trask into a basically reasonable fellow like Tony, but that there is no strength in those things to stand up to a force like Angelique.
The talisman was a gift to Lang from Barnabas. Lang refuses to keep it on his person, even though it saved his life to clutch it when Angelique was making his heart beat so fast it was about to burst. Lang shows up at Barnabas’ house, under the false impression he received a telephone call from Barnabas. Barnabas, who has no telephone in his house, explains to Lang that Angelique has lured him away. When he learns that Lang has left the talisman in his desk drawer at home, he insists on accompanying him back there.
It is too late. Tony has already stolen the talisman and delivered it to Angelique. She looks at it and says that Lang will not be able to save either Barnabas or himself. Presumably, not even by reminding him of his lines.
Mad scientist Eric Lang has been building a Frankenstein’s monster out of body parts his assistant, a man named Peter who prefers to be called Jeff, has dug up out of the cemetery. Once the body is completed, Lang will “drain the life-force” from recovering vampire Barnabas Collins into it, bringing it to life and freeing Barnabas of vampirism once and for all. The time has come to fasten a head on the creature. Barnabas and Lang decided the other day to cut Peter/ Jeff’s head off and use it. When Peter/ Jeff found out about this, he irritated Lang with a lot of small-minded objections. When Barnabas realized that his friend Vicki was in love with Peter/ Jeff, he had second thoughts and stopped Lang from proceeding with the decapitation.
Lang pulls a gun on Barnabas, leading to several minutes of rather tedious business. Lang finally capitulates to Barnabas’ insistence that they call in a second mad scientist. Barnabas assures Lang that Dr Julia Hoffman can be trusted to keep their secrets. Julia, Barnabas says, “cares for me,” and will be discreet for his sake. He telephones her.
Julia is a permanent houseguest in the great house on the estate of Collinwood. We see her there carrying on a friendly conversation with the newest member of the household. Like Peter/ Jeff, this person has two names. She is Angelique, the wicked witch who made Barnabas a vampire in the first place. She has been telling everyone that her name is Cassandra, and has made her way into the house by marrying sarcastic dandy Roger Collins.
Julia smiles at Cassandra/ Angelique, agrees with everything she says, and talks in a soft, warm voice. She praises her for her honesty, and tells her that honesty is a quality she admires in people. With this, returning viewers have no doubt that Julia knows exactly who she is dealing with. Honesty is a quality Julia finds difficult to tolerate; several times we have seen her having conversations with the scrupulously ingenuous Vicki, and she could barely wait for Vicki to look away from her before she rolled her eyes, squirmed, and showed evidence of physical pain. When Barnabas was still an active vampire Julia once went to him after a conversation with Vicki and offered herself to him as his next victim, apparently a desirable fate if the alternative was having another conversation with Vicki. Angelique/ Cassandra hasn’t known Julia long, but her puzzled facial expressions do hint that she might suspect that her pliant manner and conventional words are an act put on to deceive an enemy.
The telephone rings; as a houseguest, Julia steps aside and lets Angelique/ Cassandra, a member of the family, answer it. We see the grimace on Barnabas’ face when he hears the voice of his bête-noire answer. He asks for Julia. Angelique/ Cassandra hands her the phone, and Barnabas orders her simply to do as he says. She replies, still speaking in the sweet, quiet tone she had been using with Angelique/ Cassandra, “all right.” This is so much unlike her usual self that it can only be an act she puts on when she is in the presence of an extremely deadly foe. Barnabas commands that she come to Lang’s and bring the medallion she uses to perform stupendous feats of hypnosis.
At Lang’s, Julia asks what’s going on. When Barnabas and Lang give her a cover story about Peter/ Jeff having paranoid delusions, she has her back to them and her face to the camera when she assures them that she is accepting their version of events. Again, we can see that she is far too savvy for these two guys to hoodwink.
Julia, unconvinced by the story Barnabas and Lang have given her. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Lang escorts Julia to the room where the sedated Peter/ Jeff is tied up on a bed. Julia orders Lang out of the room. Peter/ Jeff regains consciousness; Julia identifies herself as a friend of Vicki’s come to help him, and he tells her all about the experiment and Lang’s attempt to murder him. After she hypnotizes him into forgetting the preceding five hours, she goes to the laboratory, finds the creature, and confirms Peter/ Jeff’s story. At the sight of the creature, she can’t help but scream.
Grayson Hall’s performance up to this point in the episode has been so masterful that the scream is a terrible letdown. Hall had asthma, and as a result she could not control the quality of her voice when she screamed. This was a major disability for an actress on Dark Shadows.
Julia’s scream brings Lang and Barnabas. Barnabas makes it clear that he is still determined to go through with the experiment. He just wants to make sure the person they decapitate isn’t close to Vicki. Julia staggers out of the lab. She is in the foyer when we hear her interior monologue. She tells herself she cannot be a party to another murder, not even for Barnabas’ sake. She goes into Lang’s front parlor and picks up the telephone to call the police. Lang and Barnabas come to the door of the parlor, find it locked, and pound on it. Lang draws his gun again.
This is the first episode without any cast members who were on Dark Shadows before Barnabas was introduced in #211. This one is so much focused on Julia that faces which would remind regular viewers of what the show was like in those first 42 weeks would just be a distraction, so it’s logical to leave them all out.
Sarcastic dandy Roger, possessed by the spirit of wicked witch Angelique, visits mad scientist Dr Lang. The village of Collinsport was once a whaling center, and Lang is mindful enough of that long-ago history that he collects harpoons. Roger appears to be fascinated by Lang’s collection. He holds one of the finer pieces, admires it, fondles it, and tries to kill Lang with it. At the last moment, the murder is prevented by recovering vampire Barnabas and Julia, who is a scientist as mad as Lang but infinitely more interesting. As is typical of supernatural beings on Dark Shadows, Angelique projects her power through a portrait of herself; the portrait also has some adventures today.
There is a lot of great stuff in this one, as other bloggers have well explained. The 1960s were the heyday of Freudianism in the USA, and in the first year of the show the influence of that school of thought could often be traced in the scripts of Art Wallace and Francis Swann. Patrick McCray documents in his post on The Dark Shadows Daybook that this was an episode where writer Gordon Russell allowed himself to cut loose and have fun with the sillier side of the Freudian approach.
On his Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn focuses on the scene where Barnabas and Julia decide to go and stop Roger. He points out that it is the first conversation they have had about something other than themselves, the first time Barnabas shares with Julia the secret of how he became a vampire, the first time they take heroic action, and the first time they are recognizably friends. It is that friendship that will drive the action of the show from now on.
In their meticulously detailed summary of the action of the episode on their Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri capture the effect on the audience of the steady accumulation of one absurdity upon another as the episode goes on. Reading their unfailingly matter-of-fact description of the ever-mounting lunacies we witness in this half-hour is almost as exhilarating as it was watching them in the first place.
Barnabas calls Julia’s attention to the closing cliffhanger. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Carolyn Collins Stoddard has been a spoiled heiress all her life, and now is settling into a new role as blood thrall to her distant cousin, vampire Barnabas Collins. Carolyn is trying her level best to comply with Barnabas’ command to seduce lawyer Tony Peterson so that she can steal the notebook mad scientist Julia Hoffman entrusted to him. She is on a date with Tony, and they are starting to do some serious kissing.
No matter how well Carolyn serves him, Barnabas can’t keep himself out of her way. When Barnabas is upset, nearby hound-dogs start baying; Danny Horn calls the dogs Barnabas’ “backup singers.” When Carolyn hears them, her face goes blank and she forgets about Tony. Tony becomes irritated and ends their date abruptly.
Later, Julia goes to Barnabas’ house. Carolyn is there; Barnabas sends her into the next room to eavesdrop on their conversation. The shot of Carolyn in that room recalls a similar shot of housekeeper Mrs Johnson eavesdropping on Carolyn and local man Burke Devlin, on Burke’s instructions, in #69. That shot marked the beginning of the career of the previously guileless Mrs Johnson as a secret agent Burke employed to spy on the Collinses.
As Mrs Johnson once listened to Burke pretending to a romantic interest in Carolyn, so Carolyn today listens as Barnabas pretends to a romantic interest in Julia. Julia realizes that she is unlikely ever to get Barnabas out of her life, and for a time she tried to make the best of the situation by falling in love with him. In his show of contrition and gallantry, she sees a glimmer of hope that he will reciprocate this love. Julia has seen too much to be as taken with Barnabas as Carolyn was with Burke, but she does give serious consideration to the idea that Barnabas might have given up on killing her and might be thinking of becoming her boyfriend instead.
After Julia leaves, Carolyn comes back into the room. She objects that Barnabas was being cruel by raising Julia’s hopes that way. Again, this echoes #69. Mrs Johnson came back into Burke’s room after Carolyn left, and asked him if he thought “the girl [was] involved” in the wrongdoing they thought had taken place at the great house of Collinwood. When Burke replied that anyone in the house was “fair game,” Mrs Johnson asked “Even the girl?” To which Burke replied “Anyone!” That marked the end of the episode, so we didn’t hear how Mrs Johnson reacted to that pronouncement. But she did go on working for Burke, so apparently it didn’t bother her too much.
Barnabas calls Carolyn to him, looks into her eyes, and tells her she is tired. She smiles, and agrees that she is tired. Evidently he used his supernatural influence over Carolyn to erase her misgivings about his treatment of Julia. He hadn’t done anything supernatural to quiet Carolyn’s predecessor, the luckless Willie, on any of the countless occasions when he acted as Barnabas’ external conscience; he usually just hit him in the face with his cane. Barnabas has been picking up lots of new powers lately, gaining the ability to transform into a bat, to materialize inside closed rooms, and to cast magic spells, so it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that he now has greater control over his blood thrall than he had before.
Things have been happening fast on Dark Shadows for the last several days, and writer Ron Sproat was always aware of the need to let new viewers catch up. This is the first chance Sproat has had to write a Friday episode in some time, and since some people would watch daytime soaps only on Fridays, he goes in today for some extra heavy recapping about doings at the estate of Collinwood.
As a result, the first half of the episode is confusing to viewers who have been watching regularly. In recent days, the ghost of ten year old Sarah Collins gave a toy soldier to strange and troubled boy David to keep with him as a talisman against evil; David had a premonition that his cousin, heiress Carolyn, was in danger, and passed the toy soldier on to her; Carolyn saw Sarah, and gave the toy soldier back to David; and as we begin today, David brings the toy soldier back to Carolyn. David catches a glimpse of an extremely old man peering in through the window of the drawing room; he is gone by the time Carolyn turns to look. They talk about ghosts and visions, reenacting in one scene Carolyn’s whole progression from total rejection of David’s claims about the supernatural to total openness to them, and David’s from a desperate need to be believed to an even more desperate fear that Carolyn will be killed unless he can convince her he was lying about everything.
Carolyn tells her mother Liz that she doesn’t think David is lying, and decides to confront Liz’ aversion to the topic of ghosts and tell her that she has seen Sarah. Liz says she thinks David is mentally disturbed and must be sent away to an institution; eavesdropping, David reacts with horror. He meets Carolyn in the foyer afterward. He asks her if she thinks he is crazy. When she says she doesn’t, he says that maybe he is. He pleads with her to reject his stories as either delusions or lies.
The old man David saw looking at Carolyn is their distant cousin Barnabas, who is, unknown to them and the other residents of the great house on the estate, a vampire. Mad scientist Julia Hoffman has been trying to cure Barnabas of vampirism, but she inadvertently restarted the aging process which his condition had arrested. No longer does he look like a man in his forties- now he appears to be about ninety. He fears that if he does not start sucking people’s blood again tonight, he will soon turn into the pile of dust he would have been long ago were it not for his curse.
In Barnabas’ home at the Old House on the estate, we see him talking with Julia. His peeping at Carolyn might suggest that he has her in mind as his victim, but he does not mention her. Instead, he says he will go out into the town of Collinsport and find a stranger. Julia is disappointed that Barnabas is not planning to bite well-meaning governess Vicki, with whom she had hoped never to have another conversation. So she offers herself as a victim instead.
This offer stuns Barnabas so deeply that, for the first time, he addresses Julia by her first name. She smiles when he does this. He seems sincerely dismayed by the thought of enslaving Julia. When he tells her that if he bites her, she will have no will of her own, she smiles even more brightly. Evidently Julia believes that would be a price well worth paying if it kept Vicki from talking to her.
Julia contemplates enslavement. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Barnabas declines the offer, saying that he might need to call on Julia for medical treatment at some point in the future and that as a blood thrall she wouldn’t be able to function as a doctor. Julia is hurt by Barnabas’ refusal, and asks him if the only reason he won’t enslave her is that he wants to use her professional services, and he assures her that it is.
Back in the great house, Carolyn stands in the foyer under the gaze of Barnabas’ portrait. She looks at the toy soldier and wonders about David. She decides to go to Barnabas’ house and look for evidence of the things David had claimed to see there. Oddly, she sets the toy soldier on the table and leaves without it.
Carolyn lets herself into Barnabas’ house, goes to his basement, and finds his coffin. Julia sees her there and tells her to leave immediately, “before it’s too late.” We hear Barnabas’ voice announcing “It is already too late.” Carolyn is baffled by Barnabas’ aged appearance. He moves in, bares his fangs, and bites her.
Barnabas’ old man makeup is phenomenally good, as all the Dark Shadows blogs mention. The show was very lucky to land Dick Smith, one of the pre-eminent makeup artists of all time, to do it. But I would add that Jonathan Frid’s acting takes Smith’s appliances and turns them to the best possible advantage. It is utterly absorbing to watch him as a man suddenly thrust into extreme old age, trying to figure out how to move his newly enfeebled limbs. In Frid and Smith, two artists at the top of their form collaborated to create a remarkable turn.
Mad scientist Julia Hoffman has been trying to cure Barnabas Collins of vampirism. We open today with Julia fleeing from Barnabas in terror. You’d think he’d be used to this reaction, but she’s been pretty cozy with him for a long time, so he knows she isn’t doing it for the usual reason. He demands to know why, and she tells him it’s to do with his appearance. He can’t use a mirror, so he touches his face. He realizes that, as an unforeseen side effect of Julia’s treatments, he is starting to look his age. Considering that he’s about 200 years old, the typical look would be a pile of dust, so he is quite upset about the situation.
Barnabas accuses Julia of intentionally botching the experiment because he refused to let “our relationship become all you wanted.” For the last couple of weeks, Julia has been responding to the realization that she is going to be connected to Barnabas for the rest of her life by trying to fall in love with him. He has observed this attempt, and answers it by pouring scorn on her. The other day, we saw her struggling to hold back tears at the end of an episode. She keeps her cool this time, and dismisses this particular accusation quickly.
One of the aspects of Barnabas’ sudden aging that bothers him the most is that he will have to cancel a date to watch the sun rise with well-meaning governess Vicki. Julia can hardly keep from laughing out loud when she says that “Foregoing an appointment with Vicki must be a bitter pill.” Barnabas responds “Spare me your sarcasm!” Even before she decided she would have to cultivate a romantic interest in Barnabas, Julia often showed signs of impatience when conversing with Vicki. She often rolled her eyes as soon as Vicki wasn’t looking, and sometimes plastered on a smile and spoke to her very slowly. But this is our first direct confirmation that Julia thinks Vicki is an idiot.
The Vicki/ Julia relationship is the first time on Dark Shadows that one major character is oblivious of the fact that another holds her in disdain. That adds a fresh wrinkle to their scenes together, as we wonder if Vicki will catch on to Julia’s real attitude towards her.
Barnabas orders Julia to run up to the great house of Collinwood and tell Vicki that he won’t be able to watch the sunrise with her. Julia opens the front door to comply, and sees Vicki standing there. She has overheard the last part of their conversation. Barnabas sits in a high-backed armchair with his back to her and claims that he has an illness he is afraid she will catch if she comes too close to him. He also claims that he will be leaving town on a long business trip later in the morning. When Vicki points out that these two things don’t fit together, he makes a lot of statements that don’t add up to much more than throat-clearing.
It’s also odd that Vicki, who like the other residents of the great house of Collinwood does not know that Julia is a doctor, doesn’t seem to notice that she’s wearing a lab coat, much less to wonder what she’s doing in Barnabas’ house in the pre-dawn hours. The whole scene is so ridiculous that the comedy must be intentional, on the part of the director and the actors if not of writer Ron Sproat.
After Vicki goes, Barnabas says he will have to save himself by reverting to his bloodsucking ways. Julia is shocked by the thought that the horrors will resume, and laments that she will be “partially responsible” for them.
Julia’s shock doesn’t last long. She urges Barnabas to choose Vicki as his first victim. She is absolutely gleeful about this idea.
Barnabas is miserable- he has already passed up several prime opportunities to bite Vicki, including an occasion when she invited herself over to spend the night in his house and one on the terrace of the great house when she virtually pressed her neck into his mouth. There have been times when we have expected Vicki to draw an arrow on her neck and write next to it the words “MR VAMPIRE, BITE HERE!” But Barnabas doesn’t want to let go of the fantasy that Vicki’s personality will somehow disappear and be spontaneously replaced with that of his lost love Josette. His attachment to this fantasy suggests that Barnabas is as bored with the actually existing Vicki as is Julia.
Back in the great house, Vicki tells heiress Carolyn that Barnabas was in a strange mood. Carolyn says that Vicki has become quite fond of Barnabas, and Vicki says that she is more than fond of him. She has come to rely on him. Since Vicki’s depressing fiancé, Burke, is missing and presumed dead, there is no reason why this shouldn’t mean that Vicki will fall in love with Barnabas. No reason, that is, except Barnabas’ obvious lack of interest in her.
Later, we see Carolyn and her old friend, hardworking young fisherman Joe, sitting at the Blue Whale tavern. Yesterday, Carolyn had a visit from the ghost of ten year old Sarah Collins. As a result, she believes that her young cousin, strange and troubled boy David, was probably telling the truth when he claimed to have seen various weird things.
Carolyn tries to enlist Joe in an effort to investigate David’s stories, but he won’t have it. He admits that Sarah exists. He has to- lots of people have seen her and she has made several observable things happen. Besides, Joe himself encountered the ghost of Josette in #179, so he can’t very well deny that there are such things as ghosts. But like other characters who have admitted that one or another supernatural being exists, he snaps right back to a frame of reference that doesn’t allow for the supernatural, or even for the unusual. Joe asks Carolyn if she really believes that there is “something sinister about Barnabas,” as David’s visions would imply. She admits that she doesn’t.
While Vicki sleeps, Barnabas materializes in her room. He stands there watching her, as he has done before. This time, his wizened appearance shows that it is a matter of urgency that he feed on someone. But he still can’t bring himself to bite her. Even when his existence is hanging in the balance, he just isn’t into Vicki.
After Barnabas loiters for a while trying to talk himself into doing what he so plainly has no desire to do, Carolyn comes to Vicki’s door. She apologizes for waking Vicki, and explains that she thought she heard someone in the room. Vicki isn’t upset at the interruption, but grateful for Carolyn’s concern. The two are startled when they see the silhouette of a giant bat outside Vicki’s window.
In the great house of Collinwood, well-meaning governess Vicki is worried about her depressing fiancé Burke, who is missing and feared dead after a plane crash in Brazil. Permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman enters and shows her a piece of crystal. Julia says that she thinks the crystal might have been part of a chandelier that hung in the foyer of the long-abandoned west wing of the house. Vicki plans to restore the west wing and hopes to live there with Burke, so this is of interest to her.
Julia tells Vicki to peer into the center of the crystal. As she complies, Julia stares directly into the camera and continues to give instructions. The Federal Communications Commission was very nervous about hypnosis in the 1960s, so much so that even indirect references to the process would draw memos from the television networks’ Standards and Practices offices warning producers that they must not put anything on the air that could hypnotize the audience. Apparently ABC’s Standards and Practices office wasn’t vigilant enough about the daytime dramas, because after a while we hear the tinkling sound Julia tells us we will hear and instead of the picture we see a kaleidoscope effect. By the time we come out of the trance, Julia and Vicki are in the basement of the Old House on the estate.
The Old House is home to Old World gentleman Barnabas Collins. Vicki sees a coffin in the basement, and Julia orders her to open it. After a long display of reluctance, she does. She finds Barnabas inside, apparently dead. Julia shows her the crystal again. Once more the screen shows the kaleidoscope pattern, and next thing we know Julia and Vicki are returning to the drawing room of the great house.
There, Vicki is about to say that she wants to show the crystal to her dear friend Barnabas, only to find that she has an unaccountable difficulty bringing herself to say Barnabas’ name. Later, Barnabas comes to the house and asks Vicki to watch the sunrise with him. He is diffident about the invitation, and she is uncomfortable with him. Actor Jonathan Frid may have had some difficulty with Barnabas’ lines at this point, but if so, his stumbles dovetail so well with Barnabas’ own display of shyness that they don’t hurt the scene.
Vicki overcomes her discomfort and agrees to meet Barnabas at dawn. He is about to shake her hand when she notices that there is something wrong with his hand. He looks at it and is shocked. He says something about having injured it this morning. She pleads with him to stay and let her put something on his hand, but he rushes out.
Unknown to Vicki, Barnabas is a vampire and Julia is a mad scientist trying to turn him back into a human. The night before, Julia had given him an accelerated treatment that initially caused numbness in his hand, but that later gave him such a sense of well-being that he thought he would be free of his curse by the time the sun came up. After leaving Vicki, he returns to Julia’s laboratory in the basement of his house and shows her his hand, which has aged enormously.
Also unknown to Vicki, Barnabas has designs on her and sees Burke’s absence as a sign that he should move quickly to win her affections. That’s why he ignored Julia’s objections and insisted on the accelerated treatment. In the last few episodes, the show has put heavy emphasis on Julia’s wish to start a romance of her own with Barnabas and his scornful response to this wish; perhaps she took Vicki to Barnabas’ coffin to keep her from becoming a rival for his affections. Or perhaps her motives were altruistic- even if Barnabas weren’t a vampire, there would still be plenty of reasons why a woman would be well-advised to steer clear of him.
Well-meaning governess Vicki has learned that her depressing fiancé Burke probably died in a plane crash yesterday. His body hasn’t been found yet, and she still hopes he will turn out to be alive.
We open with a dream sequence. Vicki finds herself in the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood. She is in the bedroom once occupied by legendary grande dame Josette, restored to its original condition by the house’s current occupant, Old World gentleman Barnabas Collins. Barnabas enters, accompanied by permanent house guest Julia Hoffman. As is usual in dreams, much of it is a rehash of the dreamer’s recent experiences. Vicki had met Barnabas and Julia the preceding night while on a walk and told them that Burke was missing and feared dead. Barnabas told Julia that it was too cold for her to be outdoors and sent her home, then he told Vicki that he was sure she would be a bride soon. These same lines occur in the dream.
The dream deviates from the waking scene in three key ways. First, Barnabas addresses Julia as “Doctor.” In fact, Julia is a medical doctor, a mad scientist who has come to Collinwood with an experimental treatment intended to cure Barnabas of a chronic ailment, vampirism. But Vicki doesn’t know that Julia is a doctor, any more than she knows Barnabas is a vampire. Still less does she know that Barnabas always addresses Julia as “Doctor” when they are alone. That suggests that it is not a normal dream, but is a message from the supernatural.
Second, Julia looks humiliated when Barnabas tells her she is suffering from the cold and orders her to leave. That did happen in yesterday’s encounter, but Vicki didn’t see it. So that is further evidence that the dream is a transmission from worlds beyond.
Third, while Barnabas yesterday encouraged Vicki to believe that Burke was alive, in this dream he shows her a shrouded figure on the bed and identifies it as Burke. He still insists that she will be a bride. When she says that she can never be a bride if Burke is dead, Barnabas adopts a chipper tone and says that he doesn’t see why. She is saying “He is dead, he is dead” and the camera is focused on Barnabas when the dream ends. Evidently the message is something to do with Barnabas being dead, as he is during the daylight hours, and therefore being an unsuitable groom for her.
Later, we cut back to Josette’s room, where we see Julia standing around and hear her thoughts in an extended voiceover. She has resigned herself to spending the rest of her life linked to Barnabas, and has decided that she may as well fall in love with him. For his part, he is still hung up on his long-dead love Josette and believes that Vicki will someday turn into Josette and come to him. Julia is ruminating about this crackpot notion when she senses a ghostly presence. She wonders if it is Josette. Indeed, for 28 weeks, from #70 to #210, Josette’s ghost was the foremost supernatural presence on Dark Shadows, and it was based in the Old House. But Julia resists the idea that it could be her.
In her resistance, we can hear one of the themes the show has been exploring lately. Even characters who have accepted the reality of particular supernatural phenomena don’t have a frame of reference for those phenomena. They keep snapping back to Logical-Explanation-Land and trying to find mundane answers to unearthly questions. Julia is personal physician to a vampire, and even she starts telling herself that she’s being silly to expect to see a ghost.
There is a good deal of noise from off-screen, and Julia finally accepts that there is a ghost in the room. She says aloud that it is not Josette’s ghost, it is a man’s. She thinks it is the ghost of Dave Woodard, her old medical school classmate, whom she and Barnabas murdered a week ago. She is calling out “Dave!” when she hears Vicki in the hallway outside.
Julia calls to Vicki, who joins her in Josette’s room. Vicki tells her that after she left them the night before, Barnabas volunteered to help her restore the west wing of the great house of Collinwood. Vicki wants to accept that offer. Julia becomes angry and says that Barnabas is much too busy to do any such thing, and that if he offered to do it he was only being polite.
Later, Vicki is back in the great house. Barnabas visits her there. When she tells him what Julia said and how agitated she was when she said it, he assures that he sincerely wants to help her with the project, and they speculate that Julia is working too hard.
Julia joins them. She is carrying flowers and in an abashed mood. She apologizes to Vicki for raising her voice and says that she must have been working too hard. Vicki goes to get a vase, leaving Julia and Barnabas alone in the drawing room.
Barnabas demands that Julia put her feelings to one side and approach their relationship simply as one of doctor and patient. He doesn’t ignore her feelings, nor does he make the slightest attempt to be gallant about them; he speaks of her attraction to him as if it were a mildly ridiculous offense against good manners. I suppose if someone treated you that way, it would be relatively easy to get over your unrequited passion for them, but Julia is stuck with Barnabas. When he tells her to stop being foolish and keep their relationship simple, she says that it is too late for that. Barnabas understands that as a reference to their murder of Woodard, which has indeed cut her off from any other potential life partner for the foreseeable future.
This whole conversation is conducted in loud stage voices with the doors wide open. Vicki walks in as Barnabas and Julia are in the middle of a fairly incriminating topic. She is sufficiently absorbed in her worries about Burke that it is believable that her only reaction would be a startled look after she enters the room and sees Barnabas and Julia in an intense confrontation, but they really are being remarkably careless.
Vicki finds that the flowers, which were in full bloom when she left the room a few minutes before, are now dead and shriveled. Barnabas had held the flowers briefly; evidently the vampire’s touch drained them of life. He squirms and looks up, the picture of someone embarrassed by his failure to control a bodily function in a social setting.
Looks like David Ford isn’t the only one whose metabolism creates awkward moments.
Back in the Old House, Barnabas and Julia are in the basement laboratory. She is preparing to give him an injection. He wants her to accelerate the treatments so that he can woo Vicki now, while she is lonely and confused. In case Burke does come back, Barnabas wants to have established a foothold from which to compete with him for Vicki’s affections. Julia is nervous, fumbling with the needle and complaining about the way Barnabas is looking at her. When she is about to give him the shot, he stops her, telling her that he suspects her jealousy will lead her to do something to harm him. He warns her against any such attempt. After this last moment of unrelenting hostility, we end with a closeup on Julia, her lower lip trembling.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 